Want to boost Oklahoma's health outcomes? Energy waste laws are place to start
The oil and gas industry is a major economic engine in Oklahoma, contributing significantly to jobs and tax revenue. But, we are paying for this lucrative driver of our economy with environmental degradation and harm to community health.
And unfortunately our state and federal leaders have continued to have little interest in passing regulations governing the industry that would protect public health despite first being alerted to risks over four decades ago.
Leaders first became aware of the threat to public health in 1982 when the American Petroleum Institute's Committee for Environmental Biology and Community Health issued a report that highlighted the fact that materials of interest to the oil and gas industry 'contain measurable quantities of radionuclides' in equipment, product streams or waste.
Every stage of production can produce what is known as 'technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material,' or TENORM.
During oil and gas drilling, radioactive elements are carried to the surface. And radioactive elements are often present in the massive volumes of wastewater produced by a working oil or gas well.
Currently, there are no dedicated federal regulations to ensure comprehensive and safe management of radioactive oil and gas materials. The industry was granted a federal exemption in 1980 that legally defined its waste as nonhazardous, despite containing toxic chemicals, carcinogens, heavy metals, and radioactivity.
This leaves Oklahomans reliant on state regulations and oversight, which unfortunately, are spotty at best.
Oklahoma has no general radiation provisions and therefore does not regulate TENORM waste. This lack of regulation means there are no specific rules in place to control the disposal or handling of this waste, potentially leading to exposure risks for workers and residents.
If this TENORM is not adequately managed and disposed of, it poses significant health threats to oil and gas workers, their families and nearby residents. That health risk includes the increased risk of cancer. Through mismanagement, waste can leak out of storage pits, tanks, and landfills or spill during transportation. It is sometimes purposely spread over land and mixed with the soil in an industrial waste management practice known as 'land farming.' Wastewater may be used for dust suppression or deicing roads.
A 2021 paper published in the journal 'Energy Economics' examined two decades of data from 76 Oklahoma counties.
The authors found that an increase in the number of fracked wells led to a statistically significant reduction in life expectancy. They also noted increases in those county's mortality and rates of cancer, cardiac diseases, and respiratory diseases.
More: One legislator blocks bill to prevent dumping sewage on farmland | Opinion
The industry is trying to pivot now toward the treatment of oilfield waste, but the problem is that if you remove the radioactive heavy metals that are already at elevated levels, you just concentrate them.
There are also very limited ways to dispose of the wastewater, and the chief method is injection wells, which account for 96% of disposal.
Oklahoma has over 10,600 such wells. Unfortunately, injection wells pose their own set of problems. The U.S. Geological Survey has linked them to earthquakes. In Oklahoma, earthquakes have increased 900-fold since 2008, when fracking became more prevalent.
Some of these wells are also now leaking their waste back to the surface across America. If deep formations fail to contain the toxic waste injected into them, that waste can migrate and end up in shallow freshwater aquifers.
Despite the potential environmental and health threats few municipalities have strong ordinances to protect residents from these sites and an injection site may be permitted with little to no community knowledge or involvement.
Is it any wonder that Oklahoma has such poor health outcomes, including the fourth-highest cancer death rate in the country?
If lawmakers really want to improve Oklahoma's lagging health outcomes, perhaps new laws governing the oil and gas industry's disposal processes would be a place to start.
Mike Altshuler is a retired educator and environmental activist who lives in Edmond.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: New oil, gas industry waste laws could boost health outcomes | Opinion
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